I am a political activist who has worked and lived in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This blog chronicles my time in Palestine and also provides news and analysis about Palestine and the situation on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Friday, July 22, 2016

Dear friends,Mahmoud Darwish was a voice of his people. Darwish, who died in 2008 has long been recognised as Palestine's national poet both in Palestine and internationally. His poems expressed the Palestinian people's humanity and were a chronicle of his people's joys, as well as their rage, anger and sadness at their dispossession and oppression at the hands of the Israeli state.

Lieberman, a Russian settler who lives in an illegal Israeli colony on illegally occupied Palestinian land, admonished Israel's Army Radio for broadcasting one of Darwish's most famous poem's, Identity Card. He was joined by former
spokesperson for the the Israeli Occupation Military and now Israeli
Cultural Minister, Miri Regev, in calling for Darwish's
poems to be banned from Israel's airwaves. Identity Card (see english translation of the poem below) was written by Darwish in 1964. It recounts the plight of Palestinian refugees living inside the Israeli state in the wake of the 1948 Nakba, when more than 1 million Palestinian were ethnically cleansed from their homes by Zionist forces.

During the Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic), which refers to the destruction of Palestinian society, more than 500 Palestinians towns were forcibly depopulation by Zionist terror gangs (who became the base of the official "Israel Defence Force"). More than 750,000 Palestinians fled to neighbouring states, while another 150,000 - 170,000 Palestinians became internally displaced refugees inside the newly created Israeli state.

Between 1949 and 1966, those Palestinians who had become internally displaced were forced to live under Israeli martial law. These laws, which did not apply to Jewish citizens of the new state of Israel. Martial law impacted on every aspect of Palestinian life, placing restrictions on Palestinianaccess to education and employment, as well as banning political activity of any kind. Under martial law, all Arab political organisations banned.

Martial law also meant that Palestinians were subject to regular curfews and could not leave or enter their own towns without permits. It is this apartheid permit system and oppression of Palestinians in their own land by the Zionist state which is the essence of what Darwish's poem, Identity Card, is about. To
compare Darwish's poem about resistance to settler-colonial
repression and oppression to Hitler's manifesto is outrageous to say the least. However,
Darwish's poems have long been viewed as dangerous by the Israeli state,
precisely because they articulate not only the Palestinian narrative
but also because they are part of the Palestinian people's resistance to Israel's settler-colonial
oppression. Darwish's poem are a threat because they represent Palestinian sumoud (steadfastness): that despite all the horrors visited on them, the Palestinian people continue to exist and continue to struggle for freedom, justice and self-determination.

It is no wonder that Lieberman and Regev wants Darwish's poems banned from the airwaves yet again. It is not because they bear any resemblance to Hitler's manifesto but because they represent the Palestinian narrative and Palestinian continued resistance to Israel's occupation and apartheid regime.

In solidarity, Kim

***

For
more information on Mahmoud Darwish's life and poetry, see my tribute
to him:

BETHLEHEM
(Ma’an) -- Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared the
broadcast of poetry by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish on Israeli radio
to glorifying Adolf Hitler’s "Mein Kampf," the Ministry of Defense said
on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Israeli army radio broadcast
works by the iconic Palestinian writer as part of its "University on
Air" program, including Darwish’s famous poem “Identity Card,” which drew the ire of Lieberman and other Israeli officials.

In
a meeting with Army Radio chief Yaron Dekel, Lieberman said that
broadcasting the poem contravened the station’s mission to “strengthen
solidarity in society, not to deepen rifts, and certainly not to offend
public sensibilities.”

Lieberman added that Darwish’s poems
could not “be part of the Israeli narrative program” aired on the
station, adding: “By that same logic, we can also add to the Israeli
narrative Mufti al-Husseini, or broadcast a glorification of the
literary merits of ‘Mein Kampf,’” referring to the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s -- whom Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu controversially blamed in October for the Holocaust.

“Identity
Card,” written in 1964, details the indignities of life subjected to
the bureaucracy of the Israeli occupation, and includes the lines “I do
not hate people/Nor do I encroach/But if I become hungry/The usurper's
flesh will be my food,” presumably the part targeted by Lieberman.

According
to the Ministry of Defense statement, Lieberman said that there was “a
big difference between freedom of expression and freedom of incitement.

On
Wednesday, Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev called the broadcast of
Darwish’s poems “dangerous,” adding that Army Radio “cannot allow itself
to glorify the anti-Israel historical tale, as Mahmoud Darwish is not
an Israeli, his poems are not Israeli, and they go against the main
values of Israeli society.”

Darwish, who died in 2008, is
also known as Palestine's national poet, and stands as one of the most
prominent figures of modern Palestinian literature. He has long been
criticized by Israeli political figures for his stance against the
occupation.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Dear friends,
Please find below an article on the murder of Mustafa and Rushdi Tamimi, who were murdered by the Israeli military in the village of Nabi Saleh in the Occupied West Bank.

Rushdi Tamimi was the brother of my good friend Nariman Tamimi and Mustafa is also a relative.

I have written many times about the deaths of both men and about Nabi Saleh, as I have many dear friends in the village. As I have mentioned before, while I have attended many demonstrations in the Occupied West Bank, nearly all of which were brutally repressed by the Israeli military, by far the worst repression I had seen and experienced was in Nabi Saleh.

The Israeli military would enter the village often at dawn and stay until dusk, harassing the village, firing massive quantities of teargas, which blanketed the whole village so you couldn't breath. Teargas was and continues to be regularly fired into homes, so there is no where in the village to escape it. The Israel's occupation forces regularly used live ammunition, firing it directly at children and adults.

What this current article demonstrates, yet again, is that the Israeli soldiers can act with impunity and get away with murder, even if there is demonstrable evidence and documentation showing what they did. As this article demonstrates, Israeli soldiers regularly lie about what they have done and the Israeli military system is set up to allow them to act with impunity. Very few charges against Israeli soldiers are investigated and those which are very rarely find any wrong doing.

Please find links below to earlier articles, including one by Israeli activist, Jonathan Pollack who witnessed the murder of Mustafa, as well as one by Haggai Matar, who examines the photos capturing Mustafa's death.

Mustafa Tamimi was killed when he was shot in the face with a gas
canister in a 2012 protest. A year later, Rushdi Tamimi was shot in the
belly with live fire. No one ever faced charges. A closer look at the
two cases reveals that putting soldiers to trial is the exception, not
the rule.

Chaim Levinson Jul 07, 2016 Haaretz

An in-depth
study of two incidents in which Palestinian protesters were shot and
killed during demonstrations in the West Bank shows that the level of
evidence required to indict an Israel Defense Forces soldier is
substantially higher than that demanded when Palestinians are
investigated.

Furthermore, the heavy media coverage given to the
prosecution of Sgt. Elor Azaria – the Israeli soldier standing trial for
manslaughter after shooting a subdued Palestinian assailant in March –
is extremely rare, even though his actions are not.

Of the 739
complaints filed by the Israeli nonprofit B’Tselem concerning death,
injury or beatings of Palestinians since 2000, only 25 resulted in
prosecutions (less than 4 percent). And these charges were usually for
the smallest possible violations, such as negligent use of a weapon.

Haaretz has obtained access to the IDF’s correspondence with the human
rights group (which represented the families) concerning two
high-profile cases – the deaths of Mustafa Tamimi and Rushdi Tamimi (no
relation) – which were closed without any indictments being filed. The
relevant documents and correspondence are classic examples of the manner
in which the military advocate general conducts investigations into
Palestinian fatalities.

Mustafa Tamimi’s death occurred in
December 2011, in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. Following prayer
services at the mosque, the local residents gathered in the village
square, where their usual Friday ritual commenced. They attempted to
march toward their farmland, which had been expropriated “for military
purposes” and upon which the settlement of Neve Tzuf was established.
The army deployed in order to prevent them from exiting the village. The
two sides confronted each other. Initially there were songs, followed
by curses, and then someone threw a stone at the soldiers. They
responded with tear gas and the marchers dispersed. The stone throwers
remained.

For hours, the two sides played cat and mouse, one side
throwing stones, the other firing tear gas. This is the norm in the
village every Friday.

However, things didn’t follow the usual
script on December 9. Photos taken by Haim Schwartzenberg documented
what happened at 14:26: An army jeep with soldiers from the Kfir Brigade
inside was on a stone-strewn road outside the village. Two Palestinians
wielding stones approached them, one with his face covered and the
other wearing a gas mask. A stone was thrown and the back door of the
jeep opened just a fraction. A tear-gas canister was fired from the jeep
and hit the Palestinian wearing the gas mask in the head. The jeep
moved away as the man fell to the ground, bleeding profusely.

The
wounded man was Mustafa, a 28-year-old from the village. Soon, many of
the marchers gathered around him, photographing his smashed head from
all angles. He was quickly put into a Palestinian taxi, which took him
to a nearby checkpoint.

“I opened the taxi door,” recounted a
paramedic later, “and saw him unconscious, breathing with a rattle. The
whole right side of his face under the eyes was ripped.”

Tamimi
was taken to Beilinson Hospital, Petah Tikva, where doctors commended
the treatment provided by the female paramedic. However, he died the
next morning. A slingshot was found in his pocket.

Rushdi
Tamimi’s death took place a year later, on November 17, 2012. The West
Bank was seething as Operation Pillar of Defense raged in Gaza. There
were incidents on the terraces lying between Nabi Saleh and the adjacent
road, which links settlements in the Binyamin regional council and
Israel’s center. A reserves’ military unit was summoned to protect the
road.

Video footage documented soldiers running toward Rushdi
Tamimi, who was lying on the ground. The soldiers surrounded him and
moved those present back. He was taken to hospital with a bullet in his
stomach, but died two days later. A military inquiry found that a
“mistake” had occurred, contravening the army’s values.

For 90
minutes, the army had fired all the tear gas at its disposal, until it
ran out. A medic was sent to get more, but in the meantime soldiers
switched to using live ammunition, firing 80 bullets at demonstrators
until the lethal one hit Rushdi Tamimi. In a highly exceptional move,
the company commander was dismissed after the incident.

‘No way of explaining it’
The investigation of Mustafa Tamimi’s death was supposed to be a simple
case, leading to a straightforward indictment. Gas canisters are
defined by the IDF as nonlethal weapons. Tear gas is unpleasant, but it
doesn’t kill people. Anyone not suffering from asthma or a heart
condition recovers within minutes after being exposed to it.

Being hit by a canister, however, can be lethal. Army regulations
specify that canisters must be fired from a distance of at least 30
meters (nearly 100 feet) and not be aimed at a person. They should be
pointed upward, so that the canister lands at the feet of demonstrators,
not hitting their bodies.

The soldier who fired the tear-gas
canister is called Sgt. Aviram (Haaretz has his full name), who was the
deputy company commander’s radio operator. At the inquiry, Aviram said
the soldiers had entered the village with a bulldozer, under orders from
the deputy battalion commander to clear a rock barrier on the road.
When this was removed, they turned back. One of the soldiers testified
that the deputy commanding officer was more aggressive than the
battalion commander, who only wanted them to proceed 30 meters into the
village.

Aviram and the other soldiers in the jeep testified that
they were backing up and turning around in order to exit the village,
with the jeep doors open. They were hit by two stones, one of which hit
Aviram in the chest. He asked the driver to stop and opened fire.

But the video footage shows that the identical testimony of all the
soldiers is false. The doors were closed while they were turning around,
were slightly opened to allow the shooting of the canister, and then
closed. No stone seemingly penetrated the jeep.
The brigade
commander in the area, Col. Saar Tzur, also noted that the gunshots were
unnecessary, since the task had been completed and the force was moving
away.

The main question at the inquiry was whether Aviram saw
Mustafa Tamimi approaching the jeep. Aviram said he didn’t see anything
and that he directed his fire upward.

“I looked through the
crack. The driver turned around and I asked him to stop so I could fire
toward the terraces. I looked to determine that no one was close by and
fired two or three canisters,” Aviram said in his testimony.

So
how did the canister hit Tamimi – who was only meters away – in the
face? Aviram said he had no way of explaining how this happened. When
shown photos documenting the incident, he changed his version and
claimed that he had fired directly, not upward.

In order to prove
the scientific aspect of the issue, investigators requested two
professional opinions. One came from Lt. Col. Yoav, the head of the
ballistics department in the Ordnance Corps. He stated in his report:
“It is impossible that the victim was hit by someone firing at a 45- to
90-degree angle. My statement is unequivocal, based on my familiarity
with this weapon, the ammunition and its ballistic behavior, as well as
the photos I saw of the incident, which documented the conditions in
relation to distances and elevations.”

The second opinion was
from Lt. Col. N., from Military Intelligence, who is an expert in
deciphering aerial photographs. He also stated that indirect fire was
impossible: “The angle of the rifle barrel at the time of firing was
zero or even lower.”

N. attempted to reconstruct the incident
on-site, but was interrupted when stones were thrown. Ultimately, his
testimony was favorable to the shooter: The firing was direct, but
Mustafa was approaching the jeep in a manner in which he could not be
seen – in other words, the canister was not aimed at him, Mustafa moved
toward it.

However, Schwartzenberg’s photos seem to show the
opposite. Mustafa Tamimi was standing still when the jeep stopped, his
knees bent as he prepared to throw a stone at the vehicle. He didn’t
move when the door opened. He was directly across from the door facing
Aviram. N. conducted some experiments to establish fields of vision, in
order to find out what Aviram could see. The photos show that the
opening of the jeep door was sufficiently wide so that people standing
in front of it could be seen.

The file against Aviram and the
others in the jeep was closed in December 2013. B’Tselem appealed in
February 2015, but the military advocate general rejected their appeal a
year later. The revision of a firing angle from 90 degrees to 0 degrees
was defined as a “correction … it’s certainly possible that Sgt. Aviram
didn’t remember the exact angle.”

As for the possibility that
the deceased entered the line of fire within a fraction of a second of
Aviram pulling the trigger – implying that he wasn’t observed at that
point – Chief Military Prosecutor Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas wrote, “This is
an uncommon likelihood, but it’s possible, giving reasonable doubt in
the matter.”

‘Soldiers’ lives were in danger’
In the case
of Rushdi Tamimi, the vigorous operational investigation conducted by
the army fizzled out when it passed into the hands of Military Police
investigators.

Shooting at stone-throwing demonstrators from this
distance is contrary to the rules of engagement. “They came within
meters of our forces,” company commander Yisrael testified. “I felt my
soldiers’ lives were in danger. We were worried about a lynching or an
abduction. I asked permission to use live fire, but received no answer
from battalion headquarters. My operator was hit by two large stones and
another soldier was hit in the leg from a range of five meters. I
realized that if we didn’t open fire we’d be stoned and a soldier might
be abducted. I and another soldier opened fire.” Other soldiers
testified that they didn’t aim at anyone specifically.

In May
2014, the military advocate general decided to close the file for two
reasons: First, under the circumstances, no one could disregard the risk
to the soldiers’ lives. Second, in the absence of a bullet, the
identity of the soldier who fired the lethal shot could not be
determined.

Asked to respond to the two incidents and the army’s
approach to investigating such cases, the IDF spokesman said: “The law
enforcement system in the IDF operates independently, professionally and
precisely. Each case is judged on its own merits, based on evidence
that was gathered and according to legal criteria. This is done for
cases dealing with operational activity, including these two incidents.

“The Military Police investigation of the circumstances that led to the
death of Mustafa Tamimi on December 9, 2011, was thorough and
comprehensive. Testimonies were collected from soldiers and civilians,
and a reconstruction of the incident was conducted. Video footage and
photographs documenting the shooting were collected and expert opinions
obtained.

“The soldier who fired the tear-gas canister said he
followed the regulations in response to extensive stone throwing,
without seeing anyone in his line of fire. An expert opinion determined
that Mustafa was moving toward the jeep while throwing stones, and
entered the line of fire without the shooter being able to see him. The
evidence suggests that the firing followed guidelines and regulations,
and the file was closed without taking any action against the soldier.

“The evidence collected in the investigation of the circumstances
leading to the death by gunshot of Rushdi Tamimi on November 19, 2012,
shows he was taking part in a particularly violent demonstration, which
included extensive throwing of rocks from a short range at soldiers and
civilians. The soldiers fired into the air and took further action
following procedures for the arrest of a suspect, firing at the legs of a
demonstrator who was trying to hurl a large rock at one of them. The
soldiers didn’t see [Rushdi Tamimi] or others getting hit, and when
trying to administer medical aid they didn’t see a bullet wound. There
was no way of obtaining the bullet that was extricated from his body, or
an explanation of the medical complication that led to his death.

“Examining the evidence showed that, in light of the operational
circumstances on the ground, the soldiers dispersing the demonstration
did not act in a way that warrants taking legal action against them.
There were some professional flaws in the actions of the commanding
officer, but these were unrelated to Tamimi’s death. The officer was
disciplined after the incident.”

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Dear friends,please find below an excerpt from Ben Ehrenreich's new book about the
struggle of the people of the village of Nabi Saleh in the Occupied West
Bank. Ehrenreich is an award winning journalist who has written about
Palestine many times. His book looks at both the struggle in Nabi Saleh,
as well as the overall struggle for freedom and self-determination in
Palestine.

In this excerpt Ehrenreich explains clearly the
purpose of Israel's checkpoints. In particular he looks at Qalandia
checkpoint, the major checkpoint between Occupied Jerusalem and the
Occupied West Bank.

In this excerpt, Ehrenreich discusses the
cages that are installed at Qalandia and other checkpoints. I was in
Palestine when they were first installed, so experienced the checkpoint
both before them and after their installation. I recall being both
viserally angry and sick to my stomach, when I first saw them and then
traversed them. Their installation had nothing to do with "security",
instead their primary purpose as Ehrenreich notes is to humiliate.

In 2007, I wrote the following blog "The Convenience of Occupation"
about the construction of the super terminal at Qalandia checkpoint. You
can read it here. At the time the super terminal was very new and it would be several years before the cages would be installed.

From Ben Ehrenreich's The Way to Spring

Originally posted @ The Literary Hub: 29 June 2016

Qalandia

The first time I crossed Qalandia by foot was in the spring of 2011. I
was staying with a friend from Jayyous. The wall had wrecked the
economy there. Among other things. There was no work, and the horizon
had been literally cemented off. He and his brothers moved to Ramallah,
where they shared an apartment not far from the al’Amari refugee camp. I
slept in their dining room on a narrow bed pressed up against the wall.

One morning, a few minutes before my alarm was set to ring, I woke to
a door squeaking open. Two bare legs shuffled past me toward the
bathroom. I heard water running, the toilet flushing. When the bathroom
door opened, a light-haired woman in her twenties walked by and
disappeared into one of the brothers’ bedrooms. I got up, pulled on a
pair of pants, and lit the stove to boil water for coffee. The woman
emerged from the bedroom. I mumbled a good morning. She nodded,
miserably, and made a small show of pulling her key to the apartment
from her pocket and placing it on the coffee table.

“The key,” she said. Then she opened the apartment door, and left.

I hadn’t seen her before and if I ever met her since that day—which I
likely did, because Ramallah is an overgrown village—I didn’t recognize
her, so I never learned what happened. It was clear enough from her
eyes, though, and from the tense slump of her shoulders, that I had
been the unwanted witness to a breakup, and the beginning of a very bad
morning. I choked down a cup of coffee, grabbed my bag, checked my
pockets for my wallet and passport, and locked the door behind me.

I had an appointment in Bethlehem, which meant that I had choices. I
could flag a taxi to the center of Ramallah and take another shared
taxi from the bus station there straight to Bethlehem. Or not straight
exactly—Jerusalem lay between the two cities, which meant that long,
wide loop through the Container checkpoint and Wadi Naar. Which meant
it might actually be faster to hop a taxi to Qalandia, cross the
checkpoint on foot, and take a bus from the Jerusalem side to the main
depot on the Nablus Road in East Jerusalem, where I could catch another
bus to Bethlehem. Such conveniences, of course, were not available to
everyone.

So it was that I ended up weaving my way between the cars idling as
they waited and inched and inched and waited in the shadow of the wall.
Maybe it’s the stonecutters’ yard a few hundred meters away, or the
exhaust from all the idling cars and trucks and buses, or the black
powder left by burning tires, but I do not believe there is any spot in
Palestine dustier than Qalandia. Until 2000, there was no checkpoint
there at all, just a road like any other leading from one city to
another. That year, the monster was born. It began as a humble mound of
dirt where Israeli soldiers occasionally stopped cars to check their
drivers’ papers. In 2001, concrete barricades appeared. In 2003, the
watchtower. Two years later, the Israelis razed a hill and built the
wall. Tollboothlike structures went up, and a vast and well-named
“terminal” sheltering a warren of caged passageways, turnstiles, and
inspection booths behind bulletproof glass. It kept growing, mutating,
the barriers moving, the routes and rules shifting week by week and
sometimes day by day. Uncertainty was part of the point, the constant
reinforcement of “the radical contingency at the heart of daily life,”
to borrow a phrase from the scholar Nasser Abourahme. Despite its
ever-shifting face, the checkpoint would come to feel like a permanent
feature of the landscape.

Technically, Qalandia fell within the municipal boundaries of
Jerusalem, but when the wall was built, it became a border crossing
between Israel and the West Bank. It developed its own ecosystem, as
borders do. You could buy cigarettes without leaving your car, or
SpongeBob bedspreads, or plastic jugs of purple pickled eggplant. Men
sold coffee and kebabs from carts. Women sold produce or stood begging
with their infants in their arms. Kids hawked chewing gum and Kleenex
and pirated CDs to the waiting cars, or smeared their windshields clean
with dirty rags. Outside, Qalandia was its own market, its own world.

Inside it belonged to Israel. That morning, I walked past the
concrete blast walls and through the parking lot into the terminal. I
stood beneath its high, corrugated metal roof and tried to guess which
of the half dozen or so lines was moving fastest. I chose the shortest
one and stood, inching forward into a sort of oblong cage about twenty
feet long and just wide enough for a slender adult to stand without
touching the steel bars on each side. There were people packed in ahead
of me, and people squeezed in behind. We waited, wedged together and
barely moving. This was new to me then, but it was part of everyone
else’s routine. Most were going to work. Crossing Qalandia was one stage
of their commute. I’m not sure how long it took before we reached the
turnstile at the end of the cage—not long enough for claustrophobic
panic to set in, but long enough that I could sense it hovering nearby, a
palpable presence a few inches above and behind my skull.

After the turnstile came another turnstile. We were being sorted.
Some of the turnstiles were more than six feet tall and barred from top
to bottom, a sort of revolving door-cum-cage. Some were the waist-high
kind you pass through in subways or public libraries. Except that
military engineers had these ones custom-built for checkpoints,
specially fitted with arms more than 25 percent shorter than the ones
used in Israel. The pretext, as always, was security, so that no one
could sneak by with bulky explo sives. But the turnstiles served another
function as well, a more important one, and it was standing between
them in that dank, longitudinal cell—pressed against the people in front
of and behind me, smelling the smoke of their cigarettes and the
anxiety and irritation in their sweat and their breath—that I
understood for the first time that in its daily functioning, the prime
purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from
their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall,
with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it
functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated
mechanism for the production of human despair.

That was the battle. The land mattered to everyone, but despite all
the nationalist anthems and slogans, the harder fight was the struggle
to simply stand and not be broken. It was no accident that clashes
tended to occur at checkpoints, and it wasn’t just at the soldiers
manning them that people threw stones. It was at the entire, cruel
machine that the soldiers both guarded and stood in for, and its
grinding insistence that they accept their defeat.[1]
They knew—even the kids knew—that they couldn’t break it or even dent
it and they usually couldn’t even hit it, but by fighting, by dancing
and dodging fast enough and with sufficient wit and furor, they could
avoid being caught in its gears. For a while they could, or they could
try to.

After the second turnstile, we entered a slightly wider enclosure.
The walls in front of us and behind us were barred. The ones to the
sides were a dingy white scuffed black by the soles of thousands of
shoes. Above us hung a long fluorescent bulb, furred with dust, and a
surveillance camera splashed with coffee grounds. The floor was
littered with cigarette butts and empty bags of chips. There were
twenty or thirty of us in there, crowded together, shoulders and elbows
touching. We weren’t advancing so much as being pushed forward by those
behind us.[2]
A baby was crying. Every few minutes a soldier, invisible behind a
bulletproof panel in the next room, pressed a button and a buzzer
sounded, a lock clicked, and three people were allowed to pass through
the turnstile at the far end of the enclosure.

So it went. Each group of three that filed into the inspection room
was replaced by another three. Usually, someone got stuck between the
bars of the turnstile just as it locked again. This time, the person
caught inside it was the woman I had seen leaving the apartment earlier
that morning. Her eyes were somewhere on the other side of patience, so
exhausted by rage that she looked almost calm. She didn’t see me. I
didn’t shout hello. I doubted that she would welcome any reminder of her
morning, which was only getting shittier. Finally the buzzer freed her.
She pushed out of the cage into the next enclosure. Inside it was an
X-ray machine and a metal detector like the ones at airports, only far
grimier, and an inch-thick pane of Plexiglas in one wall, behind which a
soldier sat in front of a computer screen.

The woman placed her purse on the conveyor belt, removed her earrings
and her belt, and stepped through the metal detector. A voice barked
out in distorted Hebrew through the intercom. She kicked off her shoes
and tried passing through again. The machine went off again. She stood
in front of the window, making an obvious effort to contain her anger,
spreading her arms and opening her hands to show that she was not
carrying or wearing anything made of metal. The loudspeaker issued
another staticky command, and she stepped back through the metal
detector. This time the machine stayed silent. She collected her shoes,
her earrings, her belt and purse, and pressed her ID against the glass.
The soldier stared at it and, after a minute’s inspection, waved her
through. She wasn’t done. She had to wait to be buzzed through the
final turnstile. Only when the two people behind her had gone through
the same routine and also been cleared did the exit finally unlock. She
pushed through it without a glance back, shoving her hair from her
face.[1]
“What checkpoints reinforce,” the scholar Helga Tawil-Souri writes, “is
Palestinians’ loss of orderly space-time, of the missing foundation of
their existence, the lost ground of their origin, the broken link with
their land and with their past.”

[2]
I didn’t know it then and couldn’t appreciate the irony, but Qalandia
was once primarily associated with flight. It was the site of
Palestine’s first airfield, and its only one until what is now Ben
Gurion Airport opened sixteen years later in what was still a small
Palestinian town called Lydda, which would become the scene of one of
the most notorious massacres of the 1948 war.FromTHE WAY TO THE SPRING by Ben Ehrenreich.

Nakba Keys

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About Me

I am an activist who, at different times over several years, has lived and worked as a international volunteer in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This blog is an account of my time in Palestine and also carries original news, comment and analysis (as well as reprints) on Palestine. Live from Occupied Palestine campaigns for an end to Israeli apartheid and the brutal illegal occupation of the Palestinian people. You are welcome to reprint any material from this blog authored by Kim, however, please acknowledge the author and the blog website